The True Story of an Unemployed Manager’s Brutal Search for a Job: G. J. Meyer’s ‘Executive Blues: Down and Out in Corporate America’

Riches-to-rags stories are the morality tales of recessions, and G. J. “Jerry” Meyer’s is one of the best. Excerpted in Harper’s and hailed by Studs Terkel as “astonishing” on its first publication in 1995, Executive Blues: Down and Out in Corporate America (Franklin Square Press, 245 pp., $21.95) is one of the most honest memoirs of our time about the pain inflicted on decent white-collar Americans who lose their jobs in a brutal market.

Meyer is a former vice-president of the McDonnell Douglas aircraft company who during a bruising job search came to see executive recruitment as a form of Kabuki theater, which requires actors to play roles based on myths. The process had little room for job-seekers who told truths that clashed with corporate folk wisdom. So Executive Blues is more than a diary of Meyer’s harrowing quest for work. It is the story of his effort to retain integrity in an age that routinely asks the unemployed to lie: about how much they want a job, what they can do for a company, and whether they are consummate “team players” or creative iconoclasts.

Like Aristotle, Meyer believes “how we’re supposed to live our lives is the biggest question of all.” And one of the many virtues of his memoir is that it reflects a struggle to keep his life from becoming a subsidiary of his work, or lack of work. Meyer doesn’t give advice to job-seekers – let alone flog them with bulleted lists – but offers a quietly powerful reminder that all of us are more than what we used to do.